


about fire

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [25]
Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27192412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: Lio and Galo, afterwards.
Relationships: Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Series: peachtober 2020 [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295
Comments: 1
Kudos: 37





	about fire

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober Day 25: Burn
> 
> depictions of minor injury

Lio burns himself twice in three days. The first time is an errant touch on the stove, a burner he didn’t expect to still be hot from heating the tea kettle, and it leaves a blister on the side of his finger. The second is an errant splatter of bacon fat; the mark it leaves is red and angry, though it hadn’t even really hurt, and ten days later it’s still nearly as bright as ever. He hadn’t needed a reminder that it was all really over, and he won’t have forgotten, even for a moment, when he looks down and sees the bright streak across his skin. But he has to confront it all again, in a flash, in a moment. He pulls his sleeve down over the mark. 

He’ll never really stop thinking about this part of his life. He’ll never stop being Burnish, even if he loses touch with everyone else (doubtful), even if the Burnish fade from living memory, even if he outlives it all. It will never not cast a long shadow, a tall flame at the right angle; even if he forgets the feeling of the flame at his fingertips, and of its cry sounding in the back of his mind (and already sometimes, he can’t hear it if he tries to remember), he’ll still have always been the person he was. He’ll still have done the things he did. 

Lio doesn’t expect Galo to get it. He doesn’t, totally (how could he?), but he gets it enough. When Lio pulls his sleeves down over his hands, Galo’s turning on the space heater or pulling a blanket over them both. He knows Lio can’t bring himself to say that he’s cold, because the feeling is still so foregin, the word still alien on his tongue. He wouldn’t take it all back if he could, because the fire inside of him needed to be free, but there’s a certain bitter nostalgia about it, like biting into a bar of baking chocolate when he was expecting something sweeter.

And he doesn’t have to talk about any of it. There’s no pressure, nothing like the trial lawyers and hungry journalists trying to dig their teeth into a narrative and pry out the details they want and not caring about how it’s pulling out the bottom of Lio’s foundation. It can all just sit with him, a weight chained to his wrist, obviously there but not stopping him, not screaming its presence, not inserting itself between Lio and Galo.

Galo talks about Kray Foresight, sometimes--about the fire when he was a child, about all the things that Kray had done for him, the things that came with malicious intent but that Galo looks back fondly on all the same. It’s too much to ask someone to just give up everything to which they’d tied their identity to, too much to ask them to discard a flawed or incorrect image as if it had never been there, to deliberately tar their own few happy memories. It’s easier to look to the future, to be more cautious; it’s easier for the people who didn’t know that man personally to carefully incinerate their memories of looking up to him. And all of that is part of why Galo gets it, though he doesn’t try to pretend their situations are the same. But he knows that kind of loss, the kind of thing that people in general (whoever they are) seem to think he should get over, because they place it in the same category as their own.

Even if it were, that doesn’t mean Galo has to deal with it in the same way, on the same timeline. 

Most of the time, they ride on the bike together; sometimes Galo drives but sometimes Lio does, over familiar routes out of the city, along twisting mountain paths at breakneck turns that always seem a little bit scarier when the bike isn’t really an extension of his body. And sometimes he goes out alone, chasing the feeling or for no particular reason, but just to let himself exist, against a backdrop of nothing. No flame, no law, no conflict, just him and the bike and the road and the sky, until he realizes he’s running low on gas and has to turn back.

“Do you want your own bike?” Galo asks him, when he comes back late one night.

Lio shakes his head. He’s not there yet, not ready to pick something out and call it his, or even to get an exact copy of the model Galo has. He doesn’t want something that’s nominally his but doesn’t feel like it; he’s still caught up in wanting what used to be his. All the same, he’s glad Galo asked, that despite his impulsiveness he’d looked before taking this leap. 

He smells like singed wood and oregano when Lio hugs him.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me.”

“Yeah, I did.”

Lio sighs. It’s not going to make him less likely to stay out late; Galo can and will do what he wants. 

“Go get some sleep.”

“You, too.”

* * *

Lio stops by the fire station the next day. There’s a crisp snap to the air, and Lio realizes he ought to buy a better coat. He’s going to ask Lucia where she buys hers (her fashion sense is the most roughly equivalent to his, out of all of them) but they’re already caught up in a conversation, and Remi offers him some pizza and Varys asks if he needs any ointment for the scar that’s forming over where he was burned, and Lio forgets. He’s got a few more weeks until it gets colder, probably; he can make do with one of Galo’s coats and a warm drink in the meantime (or he’ll just deal with the cold; at some point he’ll have to at least act like he’s used to it). The fire won’t be coming back to his fingertips, but he’ll be able to adapt. He’s already starting to get there.


End file.
